Capricorn Confidential (for Sun and ascendant)

By Eric Francis

Let’s start with leadership: the most important thing in the world; in our world, and the rarest thing to find. Rarer than a unicorn; rarer than a talking goat. As you are discovering, leadership is not about being the boss. It’s about setting the example; and if duty calls, it’s about taking up the mantle of responsibility. Faux leadership is about power; real leadership is the willingness to stand up. In our world right now, there is barely such a thing. To the extent that power exists, it must transform itself into example and responsibility; and the necessity to grow into these things.

Your solar charts are currently in the most magnificent setup for cultivating true leadership, a process that is happening for you from the inside out. But this is not for its own sake: there is an idea on the horizon, and it is that which you will use as the focal point of your life.

Meanwhile, you might be thinking: Man, the past year was not easy. Every other Capricorn I know said it was just the worst year in history. And what’s this, suddenly I’m up for a promotion?

Well, you always were. You know that.

Mainly because it’s so beautiful and illustrative, I would like to describe the astrology. The first element is Pluto in Capricorn. Pluto in one’s own sign is the very picture of growth; it can also come with self-obsession. Pluto has not been in Capricorn since the time of the American Revolution, so nobody alive remembers the last time around. In this sense you are a pioneer, being drawn into your awareness in a way that is entirely new for the human race.

Though there is quite the fireworks display going on in Capricorn at the moment, highlighted by Pluto newly arrived in your sign, and at the moment combined with eclipses, a recent Mercury retrograde, and your ruling planet, Saturn, involved in many of the most precipitous developments of 2010. It would be difficult to imagine a more appropriate symbol of cultivating integrity than Pluto in Capricorn. As you have no doubt seen, this transit is challenging, pushing you to open up in ways that you never have before; indeed, to admit your own existence to yourself as you are in this moment, as contrasted with Capricorn’s tendency to get lost in history.

Capricorn’s ‘ruling’ planet is Saturn, which has recently changed signs: for the next two years it will be moving through Libra, which is your 10th solar house; the house most often associated with your sign. The flavor is Libra: justice, beauty, and at least, the appearance of propriety. The 10th is the house of honor, reputation, leadership and responsibility.

With a strong 10th house (by natal, progressed or transit), one is called to a higher purpose; called to serve; and with so much as a modicum of ethics, one cannot get away with anything (so there is no point trying). While these transits bestow authority and to some extent power, they also provide a clear ethical structure that you have, by now, figured out it would be wise to remain within. Saturn arrived in Libra in the autumn of 2009 and will remain there until 2012 (after making a brief visit back to Virgo in 2010).

The watershed transit of Pluto in Capricorn is being anchored into reality, and into your reality, by the square aspect from Saturn. That is to say, the process that Pluto signifies is being grounded by actual tests, experiences, challenges and needs represented by the meeting with Saturn, which will help you establish a new way of life. Some of what you learn now you will refer to and consider for the rest of your days. That is how significant this era is; I suggest you treat the next few seasons as a precious, finite resource offering you unique opportunities to learn about yourself and the world.

A Clean Sweep and a New Mission

This is the image of a calling, a clean sweep, the sense of an urgent mission: but as Saturn squares Pluto, it, too, is being taken apart and being put back together, so the direction is not always perfectly clear; your goal is a moving target, though you need to get to the essence underneath the movement. It is fair to say that there is no aspect of your life that is not subject to renovation, recreation and restructuring. The result is a passionate drive toward personal renewal, and then as this process heats up and births itself, the energy is expressed by Saturn in the 10th house; which in turn pushes you to grow personally; which opens up not just your sense of mission but also molds your personality into the willingness to take on that karma.

It’s no accident if you feel like your integrity is being tested; in truth tests are how we build and acquire the stuff. The world is not designed to teach us to be whole people, who live in accord with our values. Rather, the world teaches us to compromise our values at nearly every turn, from eating what we know is not good for us to working jobs that we know are not good for the world. So I am not speaking about growth in the abstract here. You may decide in these very months that it’s time to do something completely different with your life.

You may clear enough debris out of the way to determine what that might be. See if you can tap into a discovery you are making about what is important to you. You have a LOT of astrology working on your side: helping you focus on values, on relationships, on how you think of yourself, how you structure your life and — as I will get into in the last section — a once-in-a-lifetime revelation about your emotional reality, your home life and family life: and by family, I mean not just your immediate relatives but the whole history of your family.

Yet remember that together, these transits illustrate the intersection of personal integrity and leadership by example. People you do not even know or have never heard of are aware of you and looking to you for a role model. No matter what we may say or think, humans learn behavior by modeling, not by theory. Consider the influence of this, over the decades and the generations.

I write this fully aware of how ethically feeble most humans are, how unwilling to stand up, or stand out, or take on the burden of responsibility. I am not here to admonish you about responsibility but rather to get you excited about such an amazing opportunity to both grow and serve the world.

One Person, of One Character

With astrology like this, there is no room for dividing your character: being this kind of person in this circumstance and that kind of person in that circumstance. Rather, you will both draw strength and energy from allowing different aspects of yourself to teach one another how to be, and from maintaining an inner dialog.

In particular, the emphasis is on integrating your actual self, be it personality or soul (however you think of it) with how you present yourself in the world, particularly the professional world. Beware of any equation in which you present yourself as one way at home, another way at work; beware of any situation where you seem to have “two personal lives.” This is a little like a potter working the clay so that there are no air bubbles trapped in the material before it goes into the kiln; bubbles cause the pot to explode.

The essence here is about existing as one unified individual; which is of course a profound challenge in this world, but it’s one that you’re up to. You have every individual component you need to make this real, including being intimately acquainted with your fears and your potential. Recent years of Pluto in Sagittarius took you, perhaps unwittingly or less-than-willingly, on a tour of all your worldly insecurities; you have been through a trial by fire which has, with any grace at all, left you with the awareness that your soul not only exists, but is fully intact. Pluto in Capricorn is the practical application of this learning.

As Malvin Artley has written of your sign that Capricorn “completes the person and endows a person with their higher qualities. It is this higher intelligence and our ability to blend it with the lives that make up our [instinctual] nature that make us uniquely human. If that higher intelligence is used to good ends it leads us to the heights of achievement. If otherwise, it can lead us to the depths of depravity.”

The high and the low: that is indeed Capricorn; the deciding factor is always integrity. Integrity is likely to involve working with the aspects of yourself that are not what you would call pure. But they are just as purely human as any other. Pluto is going to push up your sex drive. That is human; to live in integrity, be truthful about it. Pluto is making you conscious of your power; that is human; be honest and fair. The choice is not the high or the low; the choice is whether to walk a path of integration or a path of fragmentation.

While these transits of Saturn and Pluto surely give you a choice in the matter of which route to take, more is on the line in that choice than anyone has told you. You are being conferred with significant authority. This calls for a measure of impeccability.

The message from this configuration is to understand the danger of self-interest, in such a moment. While I am not here to argue against self-interest, I am here to say that with every decision you make, self-interest must be tempered and informed by community interest. Your world and the world must be seen for the ways they overlap, and your strongest point of action recognized as the common ground where the two meet.

Eclipses Across Cancer and Capricorn

This common ground is being emphasized by eclipses across your sign and your opposite sign, Cancer. These tend to be some of the most challenging personal events, because they push the limits of structure and our ability to handle the flow of events. They can seem to take us out of control of our own lives. You might want to start with the idea that we’re never really in control, but we can influence the flow of events.

All matters of growth are pushed and accelerated by eclipses. The solar eclipse that occurred in your sign on Jan. 15 has accelerated your sense of movement and growth; and has emphasized the fits and starts quality of your life: events, relationship developments and other growth necessities seem to show up all at once.

For the next year that eclipses involve your sign, I suggest you think in five-month frames of time, with the next one beginning in late June. Plenty happens between now and then, but June is the time when events begin to move rapidly and challenge your ability to handle them. I suggest you prepare for this carefully and make sure that you have full awareness of your commitments for early summer. I don’t suggest planning a vacation between mid-June and mid-July; stay where you have the most influence.

In personal relationships, I suggest that you keep the pressure low and make sure that you take every opportunity for communication, when it’s optional and not mandatory.

All of life exists in the context of relationships, and your involvements with other people are changing as fast as you are. Eclipses, however, can arrive with a distorted sense of reality. Feelings are exaggerated. The importance of events can be greatly exaggerated. Yet they are also the time when our emotional bills come due. Another function of eclipses is to equalize the pressure on both sides of any equation — in this case, to create more level working space between you and your close partners. Yet this must be done carefully, with awareness.

Self-Esteem and Resources: More News from Chiron

The 2nd house of astrology is where we look for all matters of self-esteem — and personal resources, such as money. They are related. Both are critical issues in the world today, and you have made a study of these things going back at least five years. At a certain point, you started to figure out that you had a fundamental misunderstanding with yourself about your value to the world. It’s not that you were selling yourself short; it was more like you were giving yourself away.

For you this house is Aquarius. The 2nd house tells us what our real wealth is, and where we may seek our wealth. Since you have Aquarius here, the implication is your resources come from group or collective endeavors; from ideas; and that they come with an inventive spirit.

In many ways the 1st house is a concept of who you are; the 2nd house is the endowment and expression of that concept. With Aquarius in this house, you have images in your solar chart of how your values are far more revolutionary than you usually let on. You present yourself outwardly as a conservative, that is, as someone who is personally conservative; but in truth you are something more akin to a progressive or futurist, and you have your radical leanings, particularly in recent years.

In my theory of astrology, we make our money by harmonizing with our 2nd house: and in your case that means being socially conscious, involved and connected.

Among the concrete focal points of integrity building or integration is weaving together the radical and conservative elements of your psyche. They make an excellent team. Both Capricorn and Aquarius are ruled by Saturn; Saturn’s transit across your 10th house of achievement is an expression of both you and your values, which are being integrated in a series of challenges in the world. You have a lot to gain by being out in the world, and by remembering that you live by your reputation. But — your reputation for what? I would say, at this point, your reputation for doing precisely and only what you truly believe in.

Jupiter in Aquarius the past four seasons helped you set some goals, and offered you a sense of your potential. You may be one of the few people you know whose financial potential is growing rather than shrinking, though more than being about ‘good fortune’ this has been about applying your honesty, intuition and foresight. It’s about not selling yourself short of your authentic values.

One of the reasons that you don’t struggle with self-esteem like so many people do is that you can relate to it as a concept; you can distance yourself from how you feel about yourself; you can apply logic; it’s easier for you not to get emotionally wrapped up in times when you’re struggling. Like everyone, you were subjected to being told lies about yourself, and you had an intellectual basis, even from a young age, for refuting those lies. You may have forgotten that you did so, and now is the time to remember the truth about who you are.

That said, Chiron and Neptune moving through this house the past five years (in the case of Chiron) and 10 years (in the case of Neptune) have put you through the paces, compelling you to question every value you hold or thought you held; to come to terms with your idea of how you feel about yourself — and with how you actually feel. You’ve experienced some of the drawbacks to thinking of yourself in the abstract, but those are easily remedied by getting real.

It’s likely that you have shifted from an intellectual orientation to a spiritual one; you’ve understood the power of crisis to raise awareness; you’ve determined, finally, that you really can change your values when you have to. There may have been a phase in the early 2000s when you made choices that to this day you don’t understand, including the choice for who to call a friend. Yet with the arrival of Chiron in the middle of the decade, you began to make a series of corrections.

In this process, which is still culminating, you have learned what may be your single most important life skill: how to blend your intuition and your intellect. You have learned that they don’t often conflict, if you apply both consciously. And, if you use them together, you get a total effect that is greater than the sum of the parts.

With Aquarius as your solar 2nd house, you have no doubt discovered that your friends and your community are your most important worldly resource. Yet for that to work, you must bake the strategy, and work the plan. Yet you know what happens when you differ with them ideologically and so it has become crucial to know who your friends are, and why they are your friends. At this point in your life, it’s vital that you attract people who stand on solid ground with themselves, because they are the ones who will help you stand on solid ground with yourself. Let’s look more closely at that now.

Mars Retrograde in Leo

One of the defining aspects of this year is Mars retrograde in Leo. While this transit technically ends on March 10, Mars will remain in Leo through much of the spring, and carry the flavor of Leo for the next two years.

Leo is your 8th solar house: the house of shared resources and common values. With this transit, your relationships and all agreements are being tested to come to a point of mutual interest and agreement, on certain specific points. This is not easy. Egos are involved; pride is on the line. Your tendency to avoid conflict through political means or diplomacy is being tested now, as someone in your life proves how stubborn they can be.

Yet this is compelling you to figure out what you want from the relationship, and by extension, what you want at all.

You tend to lean more in an egalitarian direction than the people you encounter. The place you can reach common ground is on the value of service. No matter how self-centered someone you are living/working/growing with may seem, I suggest you appeal to them on the level of service to begin the process of working from a common vantage point. I say this no matter how ridiculous of an idea it may seem, as regards certain people you know (such as those who seem totally caught up in themselves).

You can guide your relationships toward integrity by identifying the ways in which you and the people close to you can take responsibility for the world around you. Mars retrograde in your house of agreements, contracts and shared resources is calling you and the people around you to let go of individual interests and pursue common interests. You are very likely to be the one who recognizes these common interests first.

Mars has a significant relationship to Capricorn: it’s the exalted planet, and is therefore one of the symbols for you in any chart. We all know that Saturn alone doesn’t really explain Capricorn all the way: not for anyone who’s ever met a goat, that is. Your interests are deeply invested in those of someone else, and the feeling may be that this is intractable. You may in some ways feel like you’re the prisoner of a contract or a relationship agreement that is holding you back. Now is the time to unravel this situation.

In addition to representing what you share with others and what they share with you, the 8th also represents your secrets. That is to say, what you don’t share. If you’re paying attention lately, you’ve been discovering or digging up all kinds of previously hidden information about yourself. You may be noticing what you keep from others. You will learn a lot from making a map of these secrets.

This digging process has shifted to your commitments: marriage, business partnerships and contractual arrangements of any kind. For as ambitious as you can be, you also tend to compromise too easily. I won’t go as far as saying that you have a tendency to sell out to the desires and needs of others, but you do let your own goals get dissolved into the seemingly larger goals of anything you’re part of. In some ways this helps your leadership position: nobody can accuse you of not playing for the whole team.

A Political Metaphor

However, you seem to finally be coming around to the idea that it’s time to recover yourself, your identity and your personal goals from any contractual situation you’re involved in. This is part of a larger calling to take leadership, which begins with leadership in your own life.

Perhaps a political metaphor will work. Imagine that last year you ran for office and got elected. In order to get elected, you had to take campaign contributions and make some deals; not merely promises, but some actual deals behind the scenes. At the same time, the election process was an experience of total personal transformation. Along the way to taking responsibility, you had to reinvent yourself; you think of yourself as a very different person than you were even a year or two ago.

Now that you’ve been elected and have taken office, you have some authority and the responsibility for your actions — and the people with whom you made your deals want their payback. This puts you in a delicate situation, because you know you made some agreements that in hindsight you didn’t want to make; you compromised certain core values. And you have to figure out how to handle this.

What’s going to get you to a better place is the ability to guide people to honor the greater good. In order to do this, you need to be deeply centered in yourself. You need to minimize the risk of being taken off-center. Recovering lost or compromised integrity presents special challenges, because the people you’re involved with may not, indeed, are unlikely to have the same agenda.

You tend to be a person of honor: you want your word to count. You’re also a person who is, on a daily basis, being reminded about your participation in the greater good. Now your job is to do sufficient soul searching that you understand what motivates people, and speak to them in their own language — about what is good for everyone. What I suggest you do first is make sure you understand what you committed to, what is actually expected of you, and finally, where the individuals with whom you are involved actually stand. Their needs have changed over time, their expectations have changed, and thankfully, so too has their situation.

The Revelation: Liberation and Reflection

I have written many times that Capricorns make the best revolutionaries. This may seem odd, given the tendency to think of Capricorn as the sign of the past. It’s been said that those who do not know history are destined to repeat it. Think of revolution as the experience of not repeating the past. You have the ability to go forward like few others. For all that I have said about growth and progress and new goals, there is one point of 2010’s astrology that amplifies this to a rather large scale. This astrology is so astonishing and so unique to you that, truthfully, I am at a loss for how to characterize it. So I’ve called my astrology mentor, David Arner, and with the help of his Capricorn Moon, we’ve worked out a few ideas.

The event is the conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus on the Aries Point, which I would rate as the most significant aspect of the year. This is the cusp of your 4th house: your grounding and roots. As I have described in other sections, Jupiter-Uranus in Aries is astrology that shakes the world. And it is very close to home for you, located in your house of home and security; it affects you on the gut level, and has the opportunity to take you far from anything familiar; and in the process, deep into your core self. Many other aspects say the same thing; none with quite the intensity and creative potential of this one.

The upshot is that the changes that are developing in many aspects of your life, and have for a long time, suddenly seem to condense and manifest all at once, shaking the foundations you are standing on. The image is of some experience that seems to have the world collapse under your feet and simultaneously open up a vast new horizon for you. Whatever develops happens so fast that you don’t have time to think about it. Yet you do have time: now, which is to say — consider what you would do with a kind of wildcard opportunity. Consider what you would do if all your trappings and attachments did not hold you back. Consider what you would do if you could really be yourself, in the present.

Between now and then you are likely to have many ideas — most of which you don’t trust. I suggest you trust them, because the opportunity to manifest at least some of them will indeed happen. So if you find yourself in flights of fancy during the first few months of the year, especially about what you want to do or where you want to be, know that the stars are guiding you in some radical new direction.

Your motto for this time could be, “If I only knew now what I will know then.” You know more than you think. The story told by this astrology suggests that you will have plenty of time to reflect; plenty of time to maximize the results and effects of the change, a process lasting well into 2011. Insights will come; now is the time to vision, and for action.